Warmth of Autumn

We're heading into my favourite time of the year: Autumn. I even went by Autumn for awhile on Kodak.com's photochats way back in 1998. I probably can still log in as such if I tried *grins*

There are several days that stick in my head that distinctly remind me of autumn. Some of them were at the end of August/beginning of September and another was in November. The November memory is an unusual one. I was a Junior in High School at the time. My friends (Karen, Kelley, Sarah and someone else.. I can't remember at the moment) and I were playing "contact tennis" during gym class. It was quite warm out for an autumn day (I think it got into the 70s) and the sun made the changing leaves glow. The orange, reds and yellows were absolutely stunning. I remember thinking at the time that this was pure heaven and how I wished we could have stayed out there all day... savoring every bit. I knew it couldn't last and I have to quote something from 9th grade English: "Nothing Gold can Stay." *cringes* Yeah... I had to.

Contact Tennis

This sport still remains one of my all-time favourite ways to blow off gym class, but not really. See.. you had to go to gym class in order to play since the gym teachers had the equipment. Here's how the game went: You have 5 players, 8 tennis balls and a tennis court. Put 2 people on one side of the net and 3 on the other (placing the third close to the net). The object (if you want to call it that) is to hit as many tennis balls over the net.. at the same time making sure you keep as many tennis balls in your possession. The other thing is to try to hit the third person close to the net (or either of the 2 people on either side) with the tennis balls. Now, one of the ways to keep as many tennis balls as you can is to "charge the net" whenever you or your opponents fail to hit the ball over the net. This involves a mad scramble and clashing of tennis rackets. The other thing to do is to hit the ball so hard that it goes over the fence and your opponent has to go chasing after it (this happened quite a bit on my side). Another part of the game which really had nothing to do with anything else was to run around the net repeatedly chanting things like "It's my birthday/It's fill-in-the-blank's birthday" or other nonsense stuff. That basically is "contact tennis." We had a damn fine time playing it too. I think our gym teachers yelled a couple times about having too many people on the court or too many tennis balls, but we usually ignored them. I think that's when we found two tennis courts side-by-side and played our game over two courts. I think that only happened once or twice though. Ah.. the fun of being 16/17 years old.